PUBLIC MEETINGS

Thursday: 6 to 7:30 p.m. in Room 3 of the War Memorial Building at Balboa Park, 2125 Park Blvd.

San Diego residents last night showered city water officials with questions about how emerging mandatory conservation plans would change home and business water consumption in coming months.

Some city water customers who showed up at the Otay Mesa-Nestor branch library for the first of three public forums about the topic left wondering how their companies and landscapes could survive on less water. Others left enlightened about the scarcity of the resource, and others left hoping for more solid answers.

Several dozen people attended the meeting and, by a show of hands, most of them believed that San Diego's water officials are on the right track by setting allocations for specific properties based on prior use.

“I appreciate that there is a shortage of water and something has to be done,” said Rick Saldivar of San Diego. “I am pretty open to the solutions they have.”

Barring huge snowfalls in the mountains over the next two months, water agencies across California are likely to move from voluntary conservation to mandatory measures by July 1. Ideas include adopting steeply inclining rates and prohibiting several uses of water, such as watering lawns.

Last week, San Diego water leaders presented the concept of percentage reductions for every property as the primary method for meeting anticipated water supply shortages of 20 percent or more.

That strategy would require most customers to reduce their water use by the same percentage. By volume, lavish water users would have to cut back more but they also would get to use more than their water-conscious neighbors. People who didn't meet their water “budget” would be penalized by fees of up to five times the regular cost of water.

Water department officials plan to pitch a refined version of that concept to the City Council by late March. It's likely to include a waiver process by which residents can challenge the city's allocation. Also officials would not press residents to go below a water-use threshold deemed necessary for health and safety.

Debbie Trujillo, a condo owner in south San Diego, said she was surprised to learn how severe water shortages are and the measures the city is developing.

“I felt like,'Wow! They are going to penalize me, and I didn't know there was a problem,' ” she said, her hands clutching a stack of brochures about water conservation. “Now I am going to put signs in my house to (remind me to) turn off the water while I am brushing my teeth.”

Dennis Fowler, the superintendent of a golf course in San Diego, raised several questions about the city's methodology for figuring cutbacks and how the reductions would be applied to businesses like his that need water to survive.